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We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.

Wallace Stevens

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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Cold
Motionless
Death
Impermanence
Night
Bright
Must
Stands
Endure
Obvious
Dying
Thoughts

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Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
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It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
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It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
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The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
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It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
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Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.
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The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
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Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
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You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing.
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Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.
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Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.
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In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.
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Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.
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